For businesses large and small, investment in digital technologies is now a priority essential for success. Digitizing Government provides practical advice for understanding and implementing digital transformation to increase business value and improve client engagement. This easy-to-read book is organized into "why", "what", and "how" sections and examines the major elements of digital transformation, with clear steps for improved execution of digital strategies. It features case studies from the private and public sectors, and a detailed chronology of digital change efforts across the UK government sector, and relates that to government efforts in the USA and around the world. It provides a practical and unique set of insights into business in the digital economy.

This working paper takes a comparative snapshot of social media use in and by OECD governments. The focus is on government institutions, as opposed to personalities, and how they manage to capture the opportunities of new social media platforms to deliver better public services and to create more open policy processes. The analysis is based on a large amount of empirical data, including a survey of OECD governments on policies and objectives in this area. Major challenges are discussed, notably those related to the uncertainty of institutions on how to best leverage social media beyond "corporate" communications. The paper proposes tools to guide decision makers: a checklist of issues to be considered by government institutions, a set of potential indicators to appraise impacts, and a range of options for more in-depth policy analysis.

The globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform delivers over 2 trillion Internet interactions and defends against multiple DDoS attacks each day. This provides us with unique visibility into Internet connection speeds, broadband adoption, mobile usage, outages, and attacks. Drawing on this wealth of information, the State of the Internet Report provides a distinctive view into today's online trends:
* Levels of readiness in countries around the world for streaming 4K video
* Country-level mobile connection speeds and broadband adoption rates
* Network providers and countries with the highest levels of IPv6 adoption

Africa’s mobile operators and Over-The-Top (OTT) companies have moved in together but not yet worked out a way to live with each other. The mobile operators both want the love and interest OTT operators bring them. But in the main they can’t quite give up their defensive stance about what they feel should be their home. Russell Southwood talked to ex-mobile employee Brett Loubser, Head of WeChat Africa.

The Recommendation is the first international instrument to address regulatory policy, management and governance as a whole-of-government activity that can and should be addressed by sectoral ministries, regulatory and competition agencies.

The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy has published its report ‘Open Up’. The report recommends how Parliament can use digital technology to help it to be more transparent, inclusive, and better able to engage the public with democracy.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to enable large numbers of previously unconnected devices to communicate and share data with one another – its services span industries from agriculture and energy to transport, healthcare and much more, with the potential for significant benefits to citizens and consumers. There are already over 40 million devices connected via the IoT in the UK alone. This is forecast to grow more than eight-fold by 2022, with hundreds of millions of devices carrying out more than a billion daily data transactions.

A new report from Ericsson’s ConsumerLab, "Internet goes mobile", analyzes trends in ICT usage in urban Maghreb confirming that the region is experiencing an ICT transformation. The study represents 23 million consumers leaving in urban areas* across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The population of urban Maghreb is adopting mobile broadband rapidly which will lead the transformation towards a connected region. Within 2015 mobile internet penetration is expected to double and 7 out of every ten new phones bought are expected to be smartphones.

Broadband deployment in the United States – especially in rural areas – is failing to keep pace with today’s advanced, high-quality voice, data, graphics and video offerings, according to the 2015 Broadband Progress Report adopted today by the Federal Communications Commission.

Article 30 of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive assumes the independence of audiovisual media regulators. However, current legal instruments only focus on pre-existing legal safeguards of independence, since at this time there are no clear and enforceable safeguards available in the European legal and regulatory context to ensure that regulators operate independently within member states.

Research papers

Twenty years of telecommunications under an ANC government has seen a dramatic rise in access to telephony, as a result of the success of two mobile network operators: MTN and Vodacom. By comparison, the efforts of government have been disappointing in policy formulation, in regulation, in collection of statistics and in the interventions of the various state-owned enterprises (Infraco, Telkom, & Sentech). In particular, Telkom has admitted its abuse of dominance. Parliament failed to hold these bodies to account. The future looks promising as commercial operators work to meet the evident demand for, primarily wireless, broadband.

The Kingdom of Swaziland is a small, land-locked absolute monarchy, lying between the republics of South Africa and Mozambique. Its principal telecommunications operator is a wireless service provider owned jointly by the MTN Group, the government and the royal household. It competes with SPTC, the state-owned fixed operator. Together with the royal household, Swazi MTN has blocked SPTC from offering cellular and even fixed wireless services. While there is now a regulator, the system of governance is subject to the whims and financial interests of the sovereign, with little regard for the needs of his subjects or for the economic growth of Swaziland.

The availability of undersea cables around Africa has been transformed by a recent surge of investment, ending the monopoly in West Africa and an absence in East Africa. Private investors alone and with governments have funded the laying of cables. Consequently, previous calls for regulated access are no longer appropriate, with the need for more detailed analysis of remaining bottlenecks to ensure affordable prices in telephony and Internet access.

Studies of technology acceptance, public satisfaction, and public confidence have been applied to the field of public administration. However, the relationship of perceived fairness, or justice, to dissatisfaction with electronic adoption in e-governance has been must less examined. The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationships between perceived justice, dissatisfaction, willingness to complain, satisfaction with complaint handling, and public confidence in the context of e-governance. Using factor analysis, regression analysis, t-testing, and ANOVA, we found that perceptions of justice varied depending on gender, age, education level, and socioeconomic status. Overall, procedural and interactional justice, but not distributive justice, were positively associated with dissatisfaction, and the effects of interactional justice were stronger than those of procedural justice. Public confidence was negatively associated with willingness to complain and positively associated with satisfaction with complaint handling. The results also showed that distributive justice was related to satisfaction with complaint handling when complaints were handled offline, but not online. The findings of this study have theoretical and managerial implications for satisfaction and justice theory in the context of e-governance.

Seminars

Friday 13 February 2015

European Commission - Consultation on future use of the UHF 700 MHz band for broadcasting and mobile wireless

Thursday 12 February 2015 - Seminar at UNISA at 12:00

MTN: A South African mobile telecommunications group in Africa and Asia

The MTN Group, based in South Africa, is a multinational enterprise from an emerging economy (EE-MNE), operating mobile telecommunications networks in Asia and Africa. It was built up by winning licences and by acquiring operators, notably Investcom, a Lebanese-owned firm with operations in Asia, Africa and Cyprus, opportunities arising from the liberalisation of national markets and financialisation of the sector. MTN now has licences from some very unattractive governments, paying taxes, provides wire-tapping, collecting metadata and censoring content. Its business partners have included political parties, cronies of political leaders and individuals on the UN asset freeze list. It denies allegations it displaced a rival in Iran by corrupt means.